Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's famous novella, the story of a pilot who crash-lands his plane in the Saharan desert and befriends a boy, ‘the little prince’, with whom he embarks on a hallucinatory journey of strange tales and bizarre characters, is as cherished as it is perplexing.Selling over 80 million copies, translated into more than 190 languages and adapted for screen, theatre and opera, it might be suggested that there is little else to be done with this international treasure. The Oxford University Dramatic Society, however, refute this suggestion altogether.From the beginning the brilliance of the cast explodes in the powerful spectacle of the plane crash. The clattering of crates and hat stands was a piece of ingenious resourcefulness; the thump of a body and the menacing smear of blackness complete with sinister echoes induced a thudding sensation that I am yet to feel from any Hollywood blockbuster.The terrifying control-freak of a king, played by Jordan Waller, wins a few laughs as he roars at the little prince with an explosion of spittle; Mary Flanigan, the alcoholic, describes with such succinctness a depth of despair we must all have felt at one point in our life, ‘I drink because I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed because I drink’; and Jessica Norman fills all the requirements we might ask of the personification of a rose - dark, seductive, but at the core needy and insecure.These characters come together to form the crux of the play and present a parable of the ills of the world – greed, selfishness and self-indulgence. It is through the eyes of the little prince these maladies pale into absurdity as the king’s arrogance shatters under demands to have the sun rise and as the businessman’s ambition to own all the stars comes crashing down with some simplistic questioning.The play is enigmatic, but only to those who cannot assume the mind of the child - something the cast, excepting Lucy Fyffe as the little prince, found difficult. Transitional ‘story-telling’ scenes demonstrated slightly crass characterisations of children; not so much acting as a child, but acting childishly. Yet this only stressed the talent of each performer as they came individually to take the spotlight and thence redeem themselves.Through its lighting, sound and energetic performance, the play not only conveys the depth of the narrator’s dehydration in an arid landscape but also the mania with which we live our own lives. The Little Prince teaches that if we look ‘only with the heart’ and ask the questions only a child might, will we then, just like the rose, come to understand the ephemerality of life along with its beauty.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry dedicated The Little Prince to a friend, but not to the grown-up he was at the time, but ‘to the child from whom this grown-up grew’. It seems that all those involved in the production of The Little Prince understood this sentiment perfectly.
